The rapid development of digital still cameras and digital video cameras and the like in recent years has been accompanied by increasing opportunities for individuals to handle moving pictures on a personal computer. Further, owing to the spread of the Internet, there are greater opportunities for sending moving pictures to acquaintances by attaching them to e-mail or for uploading them to sites that provide an Internet-based moving picture sharing service in order to disclose the moving pictures to third parties.
Under these circumstances, there are many instances where a limitation is imposed upon the uploadable size of moving pictures in the case of the conventional Internet-based moving picture sharing services. For this reason, the user follows a procedure according to which an original moving picture file is compressed or has unnecessary portions removed by a client application in such a manner that the size of the moving picture file will fall within the size limitation, after which the moving picture is subjected to editing processing and stored as a separate file, which is then uploaded.
However, the prior art described above has certain disadvantages.
Specifically, one problem is that when an original moving picture is compressed, its image quality declines.
Further, even if the user attempts to create a moving picture file by removing unnecessary portions so as to obtain a size within the size limitation by making an inference from the overall size of the original moving picture, it is difficult for the user to grasp the size of the eliminated portions and difficult to stringently achieve the desired size. Adjustments must be made a number of times to obtain the desired size. This is a troublesome procedure.